The Gospel passage that Walter Brueggemann commented on for this Tuesday of Advent talks about the Temple as a center of privilege and certitude. I couldn't help but think that Trump's as seen on FOX TV-sleazebag lawyer, Jay Sekulow, certainly a total dirt bag most recently in the news for suborning perjury, ordering his fellow sleazebag lawyer, Michael Cohen to cover up Trump's Moscow ambitions, I couldn't help but think that after his show conversion to "evangelical christianity" Sekulow used that well known venue for hucksters and frauds to enrich himself and his family . . .
More than 15,000 Americans were losing their jobs each day in June 2009, as the US struggled to climb out of a painful recession following its worst financial crisis in decades.
But Jay Sekulow, who is now an attorney to Donald Trump, had a private jet to finance. His law firm was expecting a $3m payday. And six-figure contracts for members of his family needed to be taken care of.
Documents obtained by the Guardian show Sekulow that month approved plans to push poor and jobless people to donate money to his Christian nonprofit, which since 2000 has steered more than $60m to Sekulow, his family and their businesses.
Telemarketers for the nonprofit, Christian Advocates Serving Evangelism (Case), were instructed in contracts signed by Sekulow to urge people who pleaded poverty or said they were out of work to dig deep for a “sacrificial gift”.
“I can certainly understand how that would make it difficult for you to share a gift like that right now,” they told retirees who said they were on fixed incomes and had “no extra money” – before asking if they could spare “even $20 within the next three weeks”.
In addition to using tens of millions of dollars in donations to pay Sekulow, his wife, his sons, his brother, his sister-in-law, his niece and nephew and their firms, Case has also been used to provide a series of unusual loans and property deals to the Sekulow family.
and our voluntarily mentally retarded Constitutional-legal system allows that to be called "Christianity".
I know, as we all do, that anyone with a vestigial brain would know that Sekulow's "christianity" is a business opportunity for a scam artist, not anything to do with the teachings of Jesus, the Law, the Prophets, the rest of the New Testament. Yet the Constitution with it's idiotically truncated language allows Sekulow and his like to dirty the identity of Christianity with this kind of thing.
Of course, that's nothing new, that kind of thing has been going on, off and on, for as long as "christianity" has been adopted by emperors, kings, prime-ministers, presidents, etc. and used as a venue to do exactly what Jesus said not to do.
The American Constitution will almost certainly not be changed to make it impossible for this kind of scam to not prosper, the kind of pseudo-christian scams by the likes of Jay Sekulow, Paula White, William Barr, etc. anymore than it will be changed to make the bald and blatant treason of Donald Trump and his crew officially, legally treasonous.
The "enlightenment" secular legal order doesn't mind that kind of obvious, lying use of Christianity but Christians should not, out of some liking for nice, quiet, co-existence with it, fail to call it out in the strongest terms. Secularism, the "enlightenment" are based in materialism. Christians shouldn't adopt their amorality, they need something like an investigative journalistic entity that can do for these kinds of things what the Globe Spotlight team did in its famous investigation of Catholic priests who molested children and the Bishops and Cardinals that covered up for them. There is no reason to be nice about this kind of thing, Jesus wasn't nice about it, he drove the money changers out of the Temple with a whip.
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